France

Quote:
Faceted, fragmented, and oneiric, Philippe Garrel’s Elle a passé tant d’heures sous les sunlights… (She Spent So Many Hours Under the Sun Lamps) is more exorcism than expurgation, elegy than lamentation – an abstract, yet lucid chronicle of love and loss, death and birth sublimated through textural, self-reflexive impressions, visceral gestures, and metaphoric tableaux. A profoundly personal film dedicated to the memory of friend and fellow filmmaker (and May 68 idealist) Jean Eustache, and haunted by the unreconciled specter of Garrel’s failed relationship with Nico, the film opens to a crepuscular image of a couple – perhaps an actor and his lover (Jacques Bonnaffé and Anne Wiazemsky) as apparent surrogates for Garrel and Nico – in the midst of a breakup on a public street on a cold, winter evening, as their seemingly tenuous reconciliation is truncated by the subsequent shot of the couple returning home, and an all too familiar rupture as she once again lapses into the desensitized haze of heroin addiction in the distraction of his preoccupying rehearsals.Read More »

Quote:
Paris, 1967. Jean-Luc Godard, the maker of “A bout de souffle”, “Le Mépris” and “Pierrot le fou”, idolized by critics and intellectuals, is shifting from revolutionizing cinema to becoming a revolutionary tout court. Isn’t he shooting “La Chinoise”, more a political tract in favor of Maoism than an actual movie? His female star is Anne Wiazemsky, writer François Mauriac’s granddaughter, sixteen years his junior. Anne and Jean-Luc have been dating since 1966 and they marry this very year. She admires Jean-Luc’s originality, intelligence, wit and boldness while he loves Anne’s freshness and – admiration of him. But May 1968 puts their marriage to the test. Godard, who is more and more involved in the revolution, indeed becomes less and less available to his young wife, which does not prevent him from acting jealous. It also looks as if the genius is losing his sense of humor.Read More »

Synopsis
A mysterious woman, dressed in black and carrying a small suitcase, arrives in Nice and tries in vain to get a job in luxury goods shop. She ends up in a plush hotel where a solitary middle-aged man, engages her to be his companion. They introduce themselves – she is Charlotte, he is Paul. Both are reluctant to talk about their past; both need someone to make their present predicament more tolerable. Unbeknown to either of them, Charlotte is being followed by another man, who seems intent on revenge…Read More »

A black comedy about vanity and lust in contemporary America. In the middle of the sexual jungle of New York’s singles’ world…Read More »

A small picturesque Provençal village. Certainly, I grew up there, but today life seems to have somewhat deserted it. Except for the car and motorcycle repair garage where everyone, I mean the men, come to have their car serviced. What do they do? What do they talk about? A breakdown develops into a nail-biting suspense, the garage becomes the place of masculine transmission. Men are amongst themselves and repair metal bodies.Read More »

Quote:
On an island in French Polynesia, the Haut-Commissaire, a man with a turbulent naturalness and high diplomacy, lives between the highest echelons of politics and the lowest social stratum of his co-citizens. Conflict as a way of life will lead him to take reckless decisions against his political status.Read More »

A violinist passes on to his daughter three rings which represent three passions of his romantic past, and urges her to save each for men who truly deserve one.She squanders them all on one man who is undeserving.
On paper this looks promising; a beautiful actress, Edwige Feuilliere, an actor who’s just come off a starring role opposite Arletty in Les Enfants du paradis, a respected director, Jean Delannoy and one of THE four best scriptwriters in French cinema, Charles Spaak. Sometimes it all goes wrong but always with artists of this calibre in front of and behind the camera there are moments to savour and so it is here. Barrault doesn’t really convince as a violinist whereas Feuilliere has only to convince us she is in love. There are promising visuals and nine times out of ten Delannoy has the camera in the right place and when that is in front of Feuilliere’s face you won’t hear a peep out of me. Interesting as opposed to memorable.Read More »

Quote:
Les Camisards brings events to the screen from the period in French history in which King Louis XIV ordered all Protestants to convert to Catholicism. The film begins just after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1598-1685), a proclamation that had granted official toleration to Protestants. Rather than being a sweeping epic, this film examines the fight of a small group of Protestants for survival in the mountainous Cevennes region. Some of the story is told using excerpts from the diary kept by an actual participant in the conflict.Read More »

A story about pills …Read More »